


Rebuilding

by PlinytheYounger



Category: The Aeneid - Virgil
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-26
Updated: 2016-12-26
Packaged: 2018-09-12 09:37:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9066118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlinytheYounger/pseuds/PlinytheYounger
Summary: Dido and Aeneas, over the winter.





	

“I traced my way back to the gate again, and saw Priam’s palace – no, my own house first, or the plunder,” he says. His voice cracks. Caught unawares, he’s like an actor backstage, without the time to learn his lines. He’s as much a statesman as she is; he’s memorised the necessary performance of his grief, its art, but she can strip it bare in this private space. “I remember it all as silent, Elissa, empty, but there was fire everywhere, the Greeks - ”

“Empty of everything dear to you,” Dido says, “wouldn’t that make a wilderness for any man?” She smooths his hair. His head is resting in her lap, tawny and beautiful, but his eyes are gazing straight through her. He seems as unconscious of his nakedness as a child. She feels gracious, innocent.

“Priam’s palace, and the women and children crying out,” he says, “or, no, they only trembled – and I saw the shields heaped up in gore – but that was when I was there first and was maddened and thought of killing Helen – I came back and saw Juno’s sanctuary was stripped, the altars bare of - ” He closes his eyes. “Elissa, Elissa, I’ll found my city again and I will no longer even remember my city - ”

“My love,” she says. She doesn’t believe in false hope. She thinks of the catalogue of failures he recounted, the plagues, the monstrosities. Aeneas’ ships rest safe in her harbour; the Trojans and Tyrians live at peace, as one; the city rises; she cards through entrails in the pale morning and sees that the gods are with him at last.

“Sometimes I can remember it all, but not how it felt,” he says, “only the history I’ve made of it.”

That Dido guessed, and doesn’t say. “I thought I couldn’t recognise myself any more,” she says instead, “this winter – I thought I was another Dido – I didn’t know how to live again. And now I know.” And forgot the black shape of a beloved body, or scaffolded over it; inch by inch building herself over that tomb. She can’t tell him which of his memories he needs to hollow out.

He twists up then to kiss her; not absent at all now, but eager, devouring. His hand traces her back restlessly, drawing whorls and paths across her shoulderblades. She wants to tell him what a great vengeance their city will make upon the world’s destruction, but her words are all buried by his mouth, and then her thoughts as well.

She lies with him afterwards. He sleeps so shallowly; she hears in the hitch of his breath a set of footsteps on a street of ashes, faltering, faltering, unheard. And thanks the gods for lifting from him the yoke of that killing grief.


End file.
